3 Ways Marketers Can Adapt to Consumer Trends in Q4 2024

With retailers vying for consumer attention this holiday season, responding to the fast-moving consumer trends of the final months of the year is essential. So, what is the secret to success during Q4? For starters, marketers need to be agile to respond quickly to market shifts and deliver impact faster than ever. Based on current research and market trends, there are three main ways for marketers to come out on top:

Drive shoppers to buy early and spend more across the Q4 holidays

Remember that, despite growing consumer confidence, shoppers are just as savvy 

Adapt to a ‘smart’ media landscape with a more personalized approach

Early October marked the start of the so-called peak trading period, with Amazon leading the way with October sales events, enticing consumers to start their holiday shopping early. Prime Big Deal Day deals ran from October 8-9, 2024, with Amazon eclipsing its hugely successful 2023 Prime Day period from October 10-11.

Like last year, we’ve already seen many merchants responding to Amazon's promotion with competing events, giving shoppers early access to promotions. Their mid-summer event, held across July 16-17th, was its “biggest Prime Day shopping event ever, with record sales and more items sold...than any previous Prime Day event” indicating that retailers are gearing up for a fierce battle for consumer spending.

Crucially, retailers should be primed for a shorter critical selling season. The 2024 Black Friday to Christmas drive will be five days shorter than in 2023. As a result, there is more emphasis on driving sales before the Black Friday and Cyber period. This has been a growing trend over the past five years, with the aim of driving holiday season purchases in early November or even late October. Q4 2023 saw average discounts increase by five percent compared to the previous year—and, as research shows, consumer behavior is often influenced by the perceived value of offerings.

While discounts can be effective, promotions should align with your brand's positioning and target audience. If big discounts aren't feasible early in the period, capitalize on a larger pool of in-market audiences with private sales and/or lead generation activity. Private discounting gives the opportunity to create interest without trying to compete with profit-slashing promotions. It also protects brand image while crucially driving customer generation. Capturing customers early in the period offers the opportunity to retarget later in the season where customer acquisition costs generally spike.

U.K. and EU retailers should look to piggyback on key U.S. holidays—as well as commercial moments—by adding Halloween and Thanksgiving to their calendars. These holidays provide a critical opportunity to generate campaign moments that capitalize on increased online activity pre-Black Friday. According to an April 2024 survey from Salsify, 27% of U.K. and U.S. adults plan to start buying holiday gifts as early as October; these holidays present a prime opportunity to create engaging campaigns that drive sales. 

Across European markets, a ‘one size fits all’ approach is out of the question. A fully localized approach should consider language optimization and logistical nuances, such as shipping cut-off dates per market. Market promotional sensitivity also varies, with countries such as France, Italy, and Spain being typically bound by legal sale dates, and therefore not as likely to follow U.S. sale planning.

Payday planning also offers an opportunity to boost consumer demand by driving a countdown to purchase, with weeks 43 and 48 marking the penultimate payday moments before the holiday period.

As with campaign planning, media allocation should be phased for the period with a daily view, ensuring campaign budgets are strategically phased with enough day-by-day allocation without hindering customer acquisition. Retail data within Google Merchant Center Next offers a good starting point, as well as overlaying consumer trend data from Q4 2023 on top of campaign planning. That said, marketers should remain agile across the period, and be prepared to act when opportunities arise. Fluctuations in competition, pricing, or demand can all be reasons to push campaigns to spend more aggressively, if profitability is retained.

A wave of optimism running into the quarter gave marketing teams a renewed sense of hope, with retail trend analysis supporting this. Health, beauty, fashion, and tech are expected to perform well this quarter, with consumers seeking a balance between practicality and a little indulgence. The expectation is that the "lipstick effect" will be in full swing, with consumers treating themselves to small luxuries after a year of prudence. Big retailers and marketplaces are expressing positive outlooks as a result.

Despite this positivity, the lingering challenges of the post-pandemic era, the cost-of-living crisis, and online shopping preferences remain. While favorable economic conditions may provide some comfort, consumer spending remains volatile and heavily influenced by key players. As a result, marketers should be prepared to face stiff competition in the media space, with retailers desperate to claw back revenue in competitive, challenging markets. 

The continued impact of pricing competition and tightened purse strings means consumer paths to purchase will continue to be lengthy and non-linear. Research from Microsoft suggests that entering Black Friday, U.K. audiences, compared to U.S. audiences, are twice as likely to prioritize finding the best deals on products they're shopping for. In fact, they will prioritize discounts over most other factors.

In a period where pricing is critical, brands that offer memorable creative campaigns, alongside a compelling onsite experience succeed. Conducting ongoing A/B testing across creatives, landing pages, and messaging throughout the season helps identify winning tactics to continuously optimize during the period for what works for your target audience groups. Despite the need for most website testing to have been completed before the quarter, there’s still the opportunity to run smaller onsite split tests and landing page optimisations without impacting trade.

Ensuring your site is easy to navigate, provides clear product information, and offers a seamless checkout process is critical. Shopify reports that “30% of [users] will abandon their cart if asked to re-enter details,” such as shipping or payment information. This could be a consumer’s first impression of your brand—make it count.

If budgets are tight, be savvy with your spending so you can still stack up against the competition. Consider pre-purchase reserve tactics, like TikTok’s TopView ads, to ensure visibility on your key offer days at a determined cost. Measure the effectiveness of these campaigns using metrics like lift and incremental studies and use the insights gained to optimize your media mix and ensure you're reaching your target audience effectively.

Consumers are already being bombarded by a multitude of retailers across a vast array of channels, and are more willing to hunt to find the best deal. Brands can use this to their advantage by ensuring highly tailored retargeting activity is in place across key search, social, and display channels, and that cross-selling tactics are ongoing to bolster revenue on a consumer's journey to purchase. 

This quarter, more than ever, gives the opportunity to measure beyond last-click attribution. If not already in place, GA4’s event-based data-driven attribution (DDA) can start to give a more detailed view on channel performance, or better still, working with a media mix modeling attribution solution is going to give the best understanding of the impact that channels are having along the customer path to purchase.

We’ve continued to see extensive product rollouts in 2024, with the likes of Google, Meta, and TikTok leaning heavily on smart bidding, as well as AI-automated campaign generation, optimization, and targeting.

Most verticals within the SEM channel have seen benefits in 2024 due to the more abundant adoption of Performance Max (PMax), particularly across cost-per-click (CPC) and return on ad spend (ROAS) metrics. The shift away from text ad activity and standard shopping toward PMax has generally helped a large swath of advertisers achieve improved campaign performance, because of the product’s more integrated approach to driving real-time conversions from advertiser audience signals. Despite positive signs, the landscape still looks set to see hefty CPC rises during this quarter, with CPCs still on the rise across most industry verticals throughout 2024 at around +10%.

Paid social channels are also heading into Q4 off the back of a shifting media landscape. Meta, in particular, has bolstered its traffic efficiency cost with the rollout of products like Advantage+ Shopping campaigns. This allows for multiple ways to customize a campaign while saving time on manual adjustments. Average CPCs for traffic campaigns have trended down globally by eight percent. 

Likewise, TikTok is set to power the holiday season for advertisers with Smart+, automating across campaign and audience targeting, optimization, and creative. Video shopping ads (VSAs), powered by catalogs and signals, look to provide advertisers more “bang for the buck” with mid-year performance indicators also showing an improvement in CPCs and click-through rates (CTRs) across this format.

With a more extensive advertising product armory at their fingertips, marketers should use new channels to diversify media. Expanding your marketing mix in Q4 2024 will help marketers and their clients become less reliant on those typically crucial channels most likely to see CPC pressure intensify as the weeks commence. Test budgets are recommended throughout the quarter, and most offer a low-risk opportunity to drive results without jeopardizing other media allocations, given their smart bid strategies.

With an abundance of tools and products now on offer, marketers can be more effective in balancing resource limitations with channel effectiveness. Creative in particular is benefiting from AI-supported tools across Google Ads, Meta, and TikTok—reducing barriers for campaign testing. 

Product feeds are also benefiting from smart campaign setups—typically a challenge in Q4 given the large-scale changes that take place across a brand’s pricing and discounting strategies. As a result, promotional calendars will benefit from being more agile across the season, with advertisers better equipped to drive visibility.